Donald Trump and maga Republicans shoving Project 2025 down American's throats and the side effects are nauseating

Donald Trump  lies about virtually everything and he lied to voters about the deeply unpopular Project 2025, but Americans are now living under the horror of this plan in real time. 🤥 The ramming of this horrible plan down our American throats is disgusting 🤢and unlawful, being accomplished with unauthorized executive orders. 

Echo essay published by Heather Cox Richardson in Letters from an American

On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.

When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.

So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”

And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.

But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.

Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission's approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.

Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox (Fake❗) News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”

On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”

The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.

Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”

EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.

As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”

Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”

But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.

Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”💢😧❗⚠️

Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. The day before the August 1 deadline, on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.

When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth.😱 ❗ But, the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now, than it was then.

And now the growing scandal around Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.

Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Guiffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. A reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for❓😥”

Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report about the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.

And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report was dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.—

Notes:
https://www.mediamatters.org/project-2025/heritage-foundation-president-celebrates-supreme-court-immunity-decision-we-are

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-project-2025-broadly-known-severely-unpopular-voters-rcna172660

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/

https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foundation-2025-policy-america.html

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/here-we-are-2

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/us/politics/generals-trump.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/28/trump-federal-employees-preach-faith-work-00480696

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5479240/columbia-trump-administration-settlement-details

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/business/media/fcc-skydance-merger-paramount.html

https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/supreme-court-puts-humphreys-executor-on-death-bed/
The Epstein Crisis No One Controls
Guest article by Michael Cohen…
Read more
8 hours ago · 855 likes · 130 comments · Michael Cohen and MeidasTouch Network

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-jail-video-investigation/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/26/doge-ai-tool-cut-regulations-trump/

https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/who-we-are/history

Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lupiv74kmm2n

thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lv7afo2dzk2z

© 2025 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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Donald Trump and Republicans must tell consumers about how tariffs will increase costs paid by American companies

Tariffs are costly for consumers:

An opinion letter echo published in The Columbian, in Vancouver, Washington state. 

There’s a misconception about tariffs. Despite how it’s portrayed by the Trump adminitration, the foreign countries do not pay U.S. tariffs. The importer of record — the U.S.-based business that imports the product — is the one responsible for paying the tariff.

An example: If a company imports $100,000 worth of steel that’s subject to a 50 percent tariff, that company must pay $50,000 in tariffs to the U.S. Treasury. 

This is not paid by the foreign government — it’s paid by the U.S. importer. An illustration: A company imports steel to manufacture mufflers. The muffler manufacturer either keeps using the tariffed imported steel, or switches to a high-cost domestic steel supplier, making mufflers more costly. That cost is passed on to the car manufacturer. The car manufacturer passes that added cost to the consumer.

This is how tariffs cause inflation — whether it’s steel for cars, construction materials, Nike, Columbia Sportswear, or even vegetables at Safeway.

Tariffs are often marketed as a means to protect domestic industries. But the real-world impact is that they act as a tax on U.S. businesses and consumers. This doesn’t mean all tariffs are bad policy. But it does mean we need to be clear and honest about who is paying.

We encourage readers to express their views about public issues. Letters to the editor are subject to editing for brevity and clarity. Limit letters to 200 words (100 words if endorsing or opposing a political candidate or ballot measure) and allow 30 days between submissions.

From Paul Gardner in Vancouver 

Donald Trump and Republicans creating terror among innocent immigrants but humanitarian activists are resiting ICE raids

Elizabeth Castillo wasn’t an activist until Immigration and Customs Enforcement started taking away her neighbors.

Echo essay published in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg

Elizabeth Castillo -They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.

It all began in June, after Donald Trump directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to sweep Los Angeles, then used scattered violence at protests of ICE’s tactics as a pretext to send in the military. Castillo felt her working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, was under siege. Six people, she said, were seized at a Winchell’s doughnut shop. Two people were taken when ICE raided her apartment complex.

“It was just chaos,” she said. “And you can see, you can hear, you could feel the fear, the intimidation. You could feel the terror.”

A small woman with long dark hair, Castillo, the American-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, looks younger than her 38 years. She has five children, two of them grown but three still at home. Before the ICE crackdown she’d followed the news and always voted, but her kids and her job in health care administration took up most of her time. “You know, it’s practices here, practices there,” she said. “‘Mom, pick me up.’ ‘Mom, drop me off.’”

But she’s someone who knows firsthand what deportation can do to families. In 2012, she said, when her kids were all under 10, her husband, who was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States, was thrown out of the country. She’d been a full-time student; he was the family’s sole provider. Castillo had to drop out of college and explain to her children why their father could no longer live with them. “I can relate to what it does to a family,” she said. So this summer, when ICE started grabbing people from her community off the streets, she felt she had to act.

At first, Castillo was on her own with a megaphone. When she saw ICE vehicles in the streets she followed them in her car, honking and shouting to warn people that they were coming. 

She started getting up before dawn to patrol her apartment complex. Then she contacted the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which runs a nearby job center. Through them, she was plugged into a citywide network of people who are constantly tracking ICE’s activities.

Among those doing amateur anti-ICE reconnaissance in Los Angeles are people from established nonprofits that work closely with the mayor’s office. Then there are more militant groups that, beyond simply documenting ICE’s operations, try to actively disrupt them.

Ready to warn about ICE raids

“We have people patrolling all over the city starting at 5:30 in the morning,” said Ron Gochez, a high school teacher and spokesman for one of the more radical organizations, Unión del Barrio. When they find agents, he told me, “We get on the megaphone. We denounce the terrorists for being there, and then we inform the community in the immediate area that they are present. And then we say to the people, ‘If you are documented, come out. Come outside. Join us. Help us to defend your neighbor.’”

The widespread raids that have upended life in Los Angeles may soon spread to other cities, especially now that Republicans in

Congress have increased ICE’s budget to $27.7 billion, up from about $8 billion. (That’s more than that of most militaries. 😟😠) “We are a petri dish,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles told me. “They’re experimenting with us. If they come and make this stand in Los Angeles, then they can scare all the other cities, just like the universities have been scared, just like the legal firms have been scared.”

Yet if Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.

It may be no match for the Trumpian leviathan. But it can protect a few people who might otherwise get swept into the black hole of the administration’s deportation machine. And in the most optimistic scenario, it could be a foundation for a new, nationwide opposition movement.

“We have been abandoned by the courts, by the business community,” and, with few exceptions, “by the political class in Washington, D.C.,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-founder of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “All we have are our friends, our allies and ourselves.” One of his group’s slogans is, “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.” It means, “Only the people can save the people.”

These days, when Castillo isn’t working, she’s usually in the parking lot of a small, run-down shopping plaza on Orange Grove Boulevard and Garfield Avenue. There, with N.D.L.O.N.’s help, she and a few others who live nearby have set up a sort of command post that they call the community defense corner. They have a canopy tent and literature tables. Each day, volunteers meet there from 6:30 a.m. until around 10 at night. Some of them are new to activism. Others have been protesting Trump since he was first inaugurated. They half-jokingly call Castillo their C.E.O. It stands, she says, for “controllo everything over here.”

The volunteers distribute know-your-rights fliers and pictures of ICE agents and vehicles that have been spotted in the area, along with the number of a hotline to report sightings. “Meet the Clown Squad fascists in your hood,” says one handout. There’s a pile of orange whistles to blow if you see something suspicious, and beaded friendship bracelets with the phone numbers of local immigrant rights groups.

When the volunteers get word of a raid, they rush over to make a commotion. Wearing a custom black “Grupo Auto Defensa” T-shirt, Jesus Simental, a middle-aged man who works delivering industrial equipment, told me, “They don’t want noise, and we bring the thunder.”

In the first Trump presidency, the resistance announced itself with the Women’s March, a gargantuan display of feminist fury at Trump’s improbable victory. No similar spectacle greeted his return. For those who abhor him, Trump’s re-election was devastating, but it wasn’t shocking. He’d won the popular vote, giving him a democratic legitimacy he didn’t have the first time around. The dominant mood in many blue precincts was despair rather than outrage. Organized opposition to Trump seemed, at least to some observers, to be dormant. A Politico headline shortly after the election announced, “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.”

While the exhaustion was real, it wasn’t the whole story. Anti-Trump forces may have been quieter than they were before, but they never stopped meeting and planning. As the administration exceeds many of its opponents’ worst fears, they’re becoming more visible.

Resistance in the second Trump term, however, looks a bit different than it did in the first. There’s less focus on big marches and rallies, and more on trying to make a concrete difference, often close to home. Think of the doctors sending abortion medication into states with prohibitions, or the protests in front of Tesla dealerships that helped push down the company’s stock price. “Resistance 2.0 is much more locally grounded and community embedded,” said Dana Fisher, an American University sociologist who studies protest movements.

The shift in tactics derives, in part, from a changing understanding of the crisis we face. During Trump’s first term, the resistance often put its trust in existing institutions. Indivisible, founded by two former Hill staffers, organized people by congressional district and taught them how to lobby their representatives. Some liberals made heroes of establishment figures like Robert Mueller, the special counsel who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Newly awakened citizens showered the Democratic Party and big nonprofits like the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood with donations.

The assumption underlying the resistance then, said Fisher, was “that Trump was a blip,” elected by a freakish confluence of unlucky circumstances. His victory was seen as a mistake that future elections could fix. The resistance, she said, “was all about getting us to 2018, and all about trying to create the capacity to push back using the political system.”

This is, of course, a generalization; there was plenty of civil disobedience and left-wing radicalism during Trump’s first term, especially in the febrile summer of 2020. But looking back from the bleak vantage of 2025, it’s striking how optimistic many people were that some established power in American life — be it Congress, law enforcement, government bureaucrats or the media — could stop Trump from doing his worst.

As such faith has withered, the character of the resistance has changed. “We recognize that in a period of authoritarian breakthrough where there is a very rapid sprint to consolidate power, you cannot focus purely on the formal political avenues of representation,” said Leah Greenberg, one of Indivisible’s founders. “Getting out of this is going to require a symphony of defiance.”

Indivisible is running a campaign called “One Million Rising” aimed at training a million people in strategies of protest, noncooperation and civil disobedience, especially around mass deportation. The emphasis on ICE is in part simply a response to the sheer cruelty of Trump’s immigration regime. Far from prioritizing criminals, ICE, under pressure from Trump’s fanatical deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, seems desperate to round up as many people as possible. That includes people with American spouses and children who’ve been here for decades, those who’ve followed all the rules in seeking asylum, and even those with green cards.

In recent months viral videos have shown ICE agents breaking car windows, throwing people to the ground, and ripping parents away from their kids. Human Rights Watch has reported on the degrading treatment of immigrants in federal detention; at one Florida facility, men described being forced to eat “like dogs” with their hands shackled behind their backs. Venezuelan migrants sent by the United States to a megaprison in El Salvador have reportedly faced even worse conditions; Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist later freed as part of a prisoner exchange, described being tortured and sexually assaulted by guards.

Yet the campaign against ICE isn’t only about immigrants, because to many on the left, the agency is understood as the tip of the authoritarian spear. Trump and those close to him, after all, are openly fantasizing about stripping Americans of citizenship or sending them to the same El Salvador gulag that held Hernández Romero. Americans are being forced to acclimate to the once-unthinkable sight of masked men, wearing civilian clothes and refusing to show identification, grabbing people off the streets and throwing them in the back of vehicles. There have been reports of ICE assaulting and detaining U.S. citizens. 

At a Home Depot in Hollywood last month, agents reportedly tackled an American photographer who was recording a raid; he was held for more than 24 hours. (He’s now seeking $1 million in damages.)

“They have made a calculation that they can get away with a bunch of things as long as it’s framed as immigration enforcement,” said Greenberg. “That will then allow them to ratchet up authoritarian conditions for the rest of us.”

With ICE increasingly seen as the front line of a growing police state, people all over the country are looking for ways to stand up to it. In New York, ICE arrests seem to be concentrated in immigration courts, where agents have been snatching people after their asylum hearings, even when judges ask them to come back for further proceedings. Activists, in turn, are showing up at the courts to try to provide whatever support to immigrants they can. They hand out fliers — languages include Spanish, French, Urdu, Punjabi and Mandarin — informing immigrants of the few rights they have. They collect emergency contacts and immigration ID numbers so that when people are arrested, someone can inform their loved ones and track them through the detention system.

When the hearings are over, the volunteers try, often in vain, to escort the immigrants past intimidating groups of masked, armed ICE agents to the elevators and onto the street. That’s what New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, was doing when he was arrested in June.

A week after that arrest, Lander was back in immigration court with his wife and daughter. After shouting ICE agents took the husband of a very pregnant woman from Ecuador, Lander’s wife, Meg Barnette, spent an hour consoling her, then connected her to an immigrant rights nonprofit. When a woman from Liberia collapsed, panicked and sobbing, after hours of watching other immigrants being dragged away, Lander’s daughter held her baby girl.

The Liberian woman said she had a lawyer, but he didn’t show up, so Lander found one in the building to accompany her to her hearing. It’s hard to say if that’s the reason the woman was able to walk out of the court freely; at least to outsiders, there’s very little rhyme or reason as to who gets detained. “It’s like an awful game of roulette,” said Lander.

At a news conference later that day, Lander confessed to feeling he hadn’t done enough, and called on other New Yorkers to come to the courts, bear witness, and maybe engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. “We have to find ways to gum up the works of this hideous system,” he said.

Because ICE’s efforts in New York have largely revolved around the courts, that hideous system has been hidden from much of the public. It’s more conspicuous in Los Angeles, where Trump has treated the entire city like a hostile colony to be subdued.

This month, armed ICE agents backed by National Guard troops, some on horseback or in armored vehicles, stormed into the city’s MacArthur Park, forcing kids at a nearby summer camp to shelter inside. Bass was livid, but the administration made clear that she had little authority. “I don’t work for Karen Bass,” the Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, told Fox News. “Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News that roving ICE patrols had the right to stop people because of what they look like. “They don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” he said, based on “their location, their occupation, their physical appearance.” On July 11, a judge issued a temporary restraining order enjoining such racial profiling, but a widespread sense of dread and anxiety remained, especially in immigrant strongholds. With frightened people staying inside, several Angelenos told me that the eerie emptiness in their neighborhoods reminded them of the pandemic.

One thing Los Angeles has going for it, however, is a deep, established immigrant rights ecosystem. These groups, said Bass, “have prepared for this type of stuff in the past, though not as massive, not as egregious as this.” Indeed, she told me her office relies on activist networks to keep abreast of ICE activity in the city. “That’s how I learn about where raids are happening,” she said. “It’s not like we’re notified of anything.”

It’s a jarring statement about the relative impotence of city government, but also a testament to what an important role the activists are playing.

Since Castillo and her neighbors started their community defense corner, a few others have popped up around Pasadena, including outside a Home Depot on East Walnut Street. The stores have become a central site in the battle over mass deportations; day laborers often gather there to look for work, making Home Depots a common target for ICE. In response, groups of activists have, as they put it, “adopted” Home Depot locations, showing up in shifts to look out for immigration agents. On East Walnut Street, several of the day laborers told me they feel safer with the activists around. “There’s fear, but now we feel protected,” said one, knowing there will at least be a warning if ICE arrives.

While the community defense corner on East Walnut Street operates every day, extra people show up on Wednesdays, part of a weekly demonstration organized by a local librarian. Several of the protesters, mostly middle-aged and older women, told me they were part of local Indivisible chapters.

Alvarado, from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, was grateful for their presence. “The way we view it is that you stop fascism, you stop authoritarianism by protecting those that are at the end of the whip,” he said. “If you want to protect democracy, you protect the most vulnerable. That’s what we want people from all walks of life to understand. That’s why it’s beautiful to see the soccer moms, the teachers, getting it.”

Recently, said Alvarado, a woman from Van Nuys, a neighborhood about a half-hour away, visited the community defense corner on East Walnut Street, with plans to start something similar in her own area. He expects the model to spread further. In late October or early November, N.D.L.O.N. is planning a conference in Los Angeles to train people from all over the country in its strategies.

“Los Angeles was used as an experiment, and we want to share the things that we’ve done right, the things that we’ve done wrong,” he said. With ICE’s new cash infusion, said Alvarado, he expects similar crackdowns all over the country. People “need to know what to do, how to resist, how to fight back,” he said. “Peacefully, lawfully, orderly, but resist.”

There is, of course, only so much such resistance can accomplish in the face of a heavily armed, spectacularly well-funded and politically powerful deportation machine. More than 2,000 immigrants have been arrested in Los Angeles over the past month. Gochez, from Unión del Barrio, believes many more would have been taken without the work of groups like his, but there’s no way to quantify it.

Clearly, however, it matters that people are watching what ICE is doing. As Alvarado points out, a major reason public opinion is turning against Trump’s mass deportation campaign is the viral videos showing what it looks like in practice. Activist groups train people to record ICE activities wherever they see them, helping to capture both arrests and agents’ aggression toward civilian observers. “Men in masks, wearing civilian clothes, pulling guns against people who are exercising their rights while filming, that’s exactly what Americans don’t like to see,” he said.

Alvarado is a citizen now, but he grew up in El Salvador, fleeing the civil war with his brother when he was 22. The sight of masked men taking people away to sites unknown feels to him familiar. “This is a word I don’t take lightly, but people talk about disappearances,” he said of the situation in Los Angeles. “For now, it’s a stretch, I will say, but that’s how it starts. No right to due process. People just snatch you and put you in the vans. It’s something I’ve seen, and I know where that leads.”

To fight what’s coming, he believes, people will have to depend on each other. “Not by being violent and responding with more violence, but by building community and understanding,” he said.

If nothing else, neighbors banding together to weather an emergency is an antidote to helplessness and isolation. The three people volunteering at Orange Grove and Garfield when I was there — Castillo, Simental and Karen Skelly, who works as a personal and administrative assistant — hadn’t known one another before June. Now, said Simental, they’re intertwined like shoelaces: “We just all tied up together.” As we spoke, people kept walking up to take signs, fliers or bracelets, or just to say thank you. Passing drivers honked in appreciation. Simental told me about a local man who checks with him to make sure the coast is clear before he goes to the laundromat or the market.

“Everyone is protecting each other right now, and we can see it, we can feel it,” said Castillo. “I don’t know — we feel like the sheriffs in town.”

Donald Trump and Republicans must release all the Epstein Files because his dismal poll numbers are dragging down the GOP

Dear Editor,  Echo letter published in the Lake Oconee News, in Greensboro, Georgia:

Letter to the Editor: Epstein files present safety issue

Donald Trump’s usefulness to the Republican Party has run its course. Now well into his second term, he is no longer eligible for reelection, and his approval numbers suggest he is dragging the party toward a disastrous showing in the midterms. The sharks are circling, and they are not from the opposing party. They are from within his own ranks.

Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tim Burchett are among the prominent Republicans calling for the full, unredacted release of the Epstein files. Their motivation is not hard to guess. These records, which may include Trump’s name on flight logs and in financial transactions, could serve as a political cleanse. By shining light on these dark associations, they position themselves as champions of transparency and women, while quietly clearing the path for a new generation of Republican leadership.

To some, it may seem unthinkable that the GOP would turn on its most prominent figure. But make no mistake, they are ready to throw Trump under the bus. After all, they have learned from the master (Trump himself). And, surprising as it may sound, this could be America’s saving grace.

The Epstein files are not just about politics. They represent an urgent public safety issue. Girls and young women in the presence of any man named in those documents may be at risk. It does not matter if that name is Trump, Clinton, or Diddy. Accountability must transcend party lines and celebrity status.
The truth must come out, not just for political gain but for justice, safety, and the future of our democracy.

From:  Ace Jones, in Greensboro, Georgia

Donald Trump and maga Republicans cannot censor South Park creators with lawsuits: Protect Freedom of Speech

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Lorraine Ali

‘South Park’ season opener puts Trump in bed with Satan and has Paramount on its knees

“South Park” wasted no time putting its very existence on the line, again. On Wednesday, the Comedy Central series kicked off its 27th season with a searing indictment of  DonaldTrump and its network’s parent company, Paramount. 

Paramount recently paid the president $16 million toward his future library rather than fighting a lawsuit Trump brought against “60 Minutes” (Paramount is also a parent company of CBS).

It was also announced last week that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which airs on Paramount-owned CBS, was being canceled. Colbert is one of the most prominent political satirists in America, and from his pulpit has been a relentless critic of MAGA policy and Trump. Like the payout over the “60 Minutes” lawsuit, Colbert’s cancellation comes just as Paramount is seeking federal approval of an $8-billion merger with Skydance Media.

“South Park” couldn’t have returned at a better time.

The episode, titled “Sermon on the Mount,” opens with Cartman discovering his favorite radio station, NPR, has been canceled. Making fun of its wokeness was part of his identity, and now he’s lost and angry. 

“The government can’t cancel a show!” he laments before dropping a self-referential joke about “South Park’s” own vulnerability. “I mean, what show are they going to cancel next?”

Paramount might be tempted to cancel “South Park” after Wednesday night’s damning premiere, when the show repeatedly lampooned the company’s costly capitulation to Trump. 

And Paramount earlier this week announced a $1.5 billion deal with “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for streaming rights on Paramount+ over the next five years.

The new season continues to plumb the horrifying depths of 2025 when Cartman finds that his school is demanding students accept the presence of Jesus, literally. 

Stan is called to the principal’s office for not letting Jesus sit with his group in the cafeteria at lunch, even though there were no empty seats. There’s always room for the Lord, he’s told.

The townspeople become angry. They don’t want religion forced on their kids at school, but newscasts make their plight seem hopeless. “More protests today as the president pushes harder for Christianity in our schools. The president stated earlier today that the spirit of Jesus is important to our country and he will sue anyone who doesn’t agree with him.”

The truly wicked satire begins when they cut to Trump at the White House. He’s the only character whose head is an actual photo rather than a drawing, and the president’s image is deftly manipulated to reflect the many faces of the real man: pouting, grimacing, smiling, leering and pouting, again.

He repeatedly demands that everyone relax while he threatens to destroy them. He argues with Canada’s prime minister over tariffs (“You don’t want me to bomb you like I did Iraq,” says Trump. “I thought you just bombed Iran,” the PM replies. “Iran. Iraq. What the hell’s the difference❓”). 😮😳😏😉😅

Trump also lies naked in bed with Satan, revealing his minuscule manhood. Disgusted, the devil rebuffs the president’s advances and says, “I can’t even see anything, it’s so small.”

Satan is also perturbed that some rando on Insta keeps commenting about sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s client list.

“Epstein, are we still talking about that?” Trump says.

“Are you on the list or not?” Satan asks. “It’s weird that when it comes up you just keep telling everyone to relax.”

Then we jump to a segment of “60 Minutes” where the beleaguered show’s hosts mumble in terror for fear of another lawsuit as the show’s signature stopwatch sound is set to the image of a ticking time bomb. They refer to the president as “a great man” who “is probably watching” before cutting to their reporter who is covering the protests against Trump in South Park, Colorado.

Jesus touches down to address his flock under the guise of fulfilling Trump’s wish to bring Christianity back into public schools. But he’s really there to warn the crowd, and does so in a whisper. “I didn’t want to come back and be in the school, but I had to because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount.”

“The president’s suing you❓” a protester asks.

Jesus, through clenched teeth, explains: “The guy can do what he wants now that someone backed down. ... You guys see what’s happened to CBS❓ Well, guess who owns CBS? Paramount! You really want to end up like Colbert? … All of you, shut the f— up or South Park is over❗”

The town ends up being sued by Trump, and they, like Paramount, cave. They pay him off, but are also required to sing his praises as part of the settlement.

The episode ends with a pro-Trump ad by the town. It’s a realistic deepfake video of the president trekking through the desert heat in a show of loyalty to his supporters. He strips naked and once again we’re reminded that it’s not just his hands that are small.

That wail you just heard❓ It’s coming from the White House. A new lawsuit is born. 😱

Donald Trump puts energy and FBI resources into purging his name out of the Epstein files while Louisiana waits for FEMA funds

Letter to the Editor: Epstein files cover-up shows Trump is fighting for himself, not you. Opinion letter published in Reveille, the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge newspaper, by Dustin Granger.

I never fell for Trump because I grew up in Louisiana. And down here, we learn early: you can’t BS a BS’er.

From the start, he came off like a con man. Loud. Shameless. Always blaming someone else. 

I get why some folks supported him, at first. Maybe you believed in tax cuts. Maybe you were tired of the system failing you. I understand that.

But let’s be real. He wasn’t fighting for you. He was fighting to escape justice.

The Epstein files are a turning point. For years, there were stories. Modeling scams. Abuse. Women with nothing to gain came forward. And Trump’s name was always nearby.

Now that the files are coming out, what does he say?

“So much of the things we found were fake, with me.”

That’s not a denial. It’s a deflection. His go-to move: announce the crime, blame someone else, and dare you to stop him.

He even sent 1,000 FBI agents to scan the files for his name. He’s not worried about victims. He’s worried about himself.

And what are our leaders doing? Speaker Mike Johnson. Higgins. Scalise. Letlow. Kennedy. Cassidy. They’re covering for him. Blocking the release. Shutting down Congress.

Families in Louisiana are still waiting on FEMA. Still watching their insurance go up. Still losing land to the Gulf. And these men are using their power to protect a predator.

You don’t owe him anything. Not your silence. Not your loyalty.

Because you already know the truth:

You can’t BS a BS’er. 💩💩

From Dustin Granger, an LSU alumnus residing in Lake Charles LA. He is the treasurer of the Louisiana Democratic Party.

Democrats must support people who show examples of hope and courage in the dangerous age of maga Trumpzi-ism

Maria Shrivere writes in "Sunday Paper": The other evening as I watched the news, I listened to a national anchor interview a young, up-and-coming Democratic Texas representative James Talarico. 

An unnamed political strategist said: "Only a savior can save the Democratic Party." The strategist supposedly went on to say that the country and party need an actual, real-life savior, and that this so-called savior will not appear until after the midterms.

The young Texas representative smartly responded by saying, “I already have a savior. And furthermore, I don’t believe we have to wait until then to save ourselves.”

He went on, “We must all acknowledge what is broken in both parties and offer a vision for how to fix it. I think folks are hungry for the truth.”

Amen to that.

The next morning, looking at the trees and listening to the birds, I found myself thinking again about the privilege of being alive and how absurd the idea of waiting for some fantasy political “savior” is.

Sitting around waiting for someone to save you—be it politically, romantically, financially—is dangerous. Isn’t that what gets us into trouble in the first place? Believing that someone else is going to save us, make the hard choices, or know what’s better for us than we do?

Sadly and truthfully, I’ve been there before. Waiting for someone to come along and save me. Waiting for someone to come along and tell me what to do, how to move myself forward, and tell me that it’s all going to be okay.

Yes, I hate to admit it, but there was a time when I thought someone other than myself would know how to build my media company, would know how to grow MOSH, would know how to expand my work at the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement, or would tell me what to do regarding certain personal decisions. 

I was waiting for someone to walk in the door, make my troubles go away, and ease my pain. I often wondered silently when I met someone new: Is this the person who will show me the way?

But guess what ❓No one did.

It was only when I realized that I was the person who knew what was best for me that I was able to get busy building what I envisioned for myself. It was only after I took responsibility for myself that I was able to see my life differently. It was only after leaning into my faith in God, my faith in myself, and my faith in my dreams that things started to become clearer and that my confidence grew.

I didn’t need to be saved by some unknown person, and neither do you. We also don’t need a political savior. First, we need to believe in our country. We need to believe in the potential of ourselves. We need to take responsibility for ourselves. We need to take responsibility for things that are broken. We need to find a way to work with others—yes, even those we think we can’t work with—to build something we can all be proud of.

Someone can always emerge who can help us amplify our dreams. That happens a lot. But when we sit around abdicating our power, waiting for some unnamed savior to come along and save us, that’s when we get in trouble. 

We surrender our thinking skills. We surrender our judgment, our clear vision, and perhaps worst of all, we lose our courage. And courage is what this moment needs.

Whenever we sit around thinking someone else is smarter, or that someone else knows us better than ourselves, that’s when we enter dangerous territory. And when you are in this territory, you can talk yourself into all kinds of things. You start seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. But trust me, now is not the time to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

Please do not allow yourself to believe crazy, outlandish things, like the “story” that former President Barack Obama is guilty of treason, as some are alluding to. I mean, please. That video❓😧😒 C'mon.

Do not allow yourself to become a victim to a distract-deflect strategy. Do not let someone come along and gaslight you or manipulate you—be it in your personal life, your professional life, your public life, or your political life.

We all need courage. You are smart. You are clear-eyed. You know the truth when you see it, hear it, witness it. You can see that children and others are starving in Gaza. You can see that it’s possible to denounce this tragedy without being labeled antisemitic. You can see that chaos reigns in Washington, and that it’s not just one party that needs saving, but that both must take accountability and offer the change the American people deserve. You know that courage isn’t reserved for so-called saviors. You have courage, too. Don’t tell yourself otherwise.

Rep. Melissa Hortman and Mark Hortman murdered in Minnesota

Which brings me back to that “savior” comment from the Democratic strategist. Don’t tell the family of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman that we need a savior—what we need is someone with the courage to lead. I hope we can remind ourselves that there are already so many people in public life exhibiting courage on the front lines, every single day. You may not agree with everything they say or do, but courageous they are: Josh Shapiro, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pete Buttigieg are just a few, but there are plenty of others—including people running for statewide and local offices now. They may not be “saviors.” That’s the wrong word. But they are public servants, risking their lives for our country.

This is not the time to abdicate your courage. It’s not the time to lie down and wait for some so-called savior to come along. 

Rather, this is the time to see yourself as smart, capable, and courageous, no matter your age, no matter what you have been through. Because it’s true.

I am 100 percent sure that you have had to be courageous to get to this moment in your life. Maybe you haven’t used that word before, but it’s the truth. Getting through life requires courage. Staying true to your principles requires courage. Falling down and getting back up requires courage. Starting again requires courage. Going, staying, persevering—it all requires courage.

This week, courage was on display everywhere I looked. The Wall Street Journal showed courage when it stood by its reporting, even though the president threatened it. They stood strong. PBS also came out swinging. “We intend to stay the course,” they said.

At least, let’s hope so.

Andrea Gibson’s wife showed courage in the face of her grief. The families in Texas who buried their little girls showed courage—wow, did they ever. Actor Gary Sinise displayed tremendous courage in talking about his grief and his son. The families of the Idaho victims showed unwavering courage as they stood to face their children’s killer in court. This coward just sat there like a motionless wax figure. Disgusting.

Courage or cowardice. It’s a choice.

Speaking of courage, every week I’m blown away by so many Sunday PLUS members who show courage in their weekly comments. I’m often left speechless by all they are juggling, dealing with, and managing without complaint. They are grateful to be here and to be alive, to be in service to family, to community, to one another. They give me so much hope. They really do. They are caregiving, 

So here we are. And here I am. In a way, I’m back to where I started. It’s early in the a.m. on yet another summer day. The sun is out. A butterfly flies by. Negative news abounds. 😒😞For some reason—maybe it’s a good one, I don’t know—Jeffrey Epstein still dominates the news, something, no doubt, Donald Trump finds beyond irritating. But thankfully, I’m focused on the hope that abounds.

Yes, I’m focused on the hope in you and in me. So that’s what today’s edition of The Sunday Paper is all about. The hope that lies in medical research. The hope that lies in our kids. The hope I have in the Pope and so many other spiritual leaders that I look to for daily inspiration. The hope that resides in the millions of us who are grandparents, who are right there alongside our kids offering a helping hand, some wisdom, some perspective—and always, some laughs. (Hope is a motivator, said Pope Francis.  Hope does not disappoint, said Pope Leo XIV)

"Hope is a thing with feathers," wrote Emily Dickinson.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Mr. Fred Rogers used to say, “Look for the helpers.” Amen to that, but also keep your mind on hope. Do not let the news, the negativity, or the algorithm take you down.

The early morning is full of hope, as is the world around you. 

Can you hear the birds? (...a thing with feathers). Can you hear the sounds of summer❓ Can you smell the grass and the morning air❓ That’s hope you see coming ‘round the bend and down the street. It makes me smile. And I hope it has the same effect on you as well.

I’ll leave you with this message I got from my friend Jimmy. Thank goodness it was the first message I read this summer morning: “I’m on a train from Poland to Prague ~ watching life go by outside the window. Our time together is so incredibly brief. We think we are here forever. Our lives are but a blip on the great big screen of life. It all goes by SO FAST ~ a gentle reminder to savor this moment, because I promise you this: it will not last.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans have spent down their political capitol and now desperate to fix what is broken

"Trump and the Republican Congress have already squandered the polling advantages they enjoyed at the start of the year, rapidly bleeding the support of young people and failing to cement the gains the president had made with nonwhites."

Trump Took Office With a Lot of Political Capital. In 6 Months, He’s Squandered It, by Ross Barkan published in New York Magazine Intelligencer.

For a brief, shimmering moment in the aftermath of the 2024 election, almost everything seemed possible for Donald Trump.

Maine Writer premonition.....IMO, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde set the tone for the over inflated election euphoria. 

 "From the pulpit, Bishop Mariann Budde spoke directly to Trump, who was seated in the front row. 'I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said, invoking gay, lesbian, and transgender children, as well as undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. Her plea for mercy caused an international firestorm; critics condemned her politicization of the church, and admirers praised her courage'." Washingtonian

Unlike 2016, Trump had won the popular vote, and Americans, against all odds, 😒 had developed a warmer view of him. 🙄

MAGA was ascendant. It was plausible to perceive Trump’s victory as a harbinger of a broader realignment: Among Black, Latino, and Asian voters, Trump had made tangible gains, and those under 30 moved decisively toward the former and future president relative to 2020. The social-justice or woke era was in eclipse, and there was no shortage of ruminations on the rightward shift of the youth and the inability of liberals to matter to this new counterculture.

Conservative intellectuals like Oren Cass and a number of right-populist politicians, including Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, heralded a new Republican Party that could, if savvy and disciplined enough, triangulate or even break the American left. 

These MAGA leaders expressed support for organized labor and offered stinging critiques of laissez-faire capitalism — it’s easy to forget that portions of Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention sounded like they were cribbed from Bernie Sanders — while maintaining a sense of cultural conservatism. They were anti-immigrant, staunchly patriotic, and skeptical of the Reaganite wing of the GOP that had, over the decades, alienated the working class. Trump appeared to intuitively grasp this, beating the Biden administration to the site of a toxic train derailment in Ohio and later, upon winning again, nominating a Labor secretary who genuinely embraced labor rights.

If Trump had rhetorically wrenched his party left on economics, his actual presidency has proved that the realignment chatter was at best premature and at worst foolhardy. Trump and the Republican Congress have already squandered the polling advantages they enjoyed at the start of the year, rapidly bleeding the support of young people and failing to cement the gains the president had made with nonwhites. Trump’s overall approval rating has plunged, and unlike even Biden’s decline — driven by his advanced age and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan — it has been almost entirely self-inflicted and within his control.

Consider the state of the nation on the day Trump took office: Inflation was beginning to cool, the economy was expanding, and even border crossings were falling. 

Americans were largely supportive of Trump’s call to tighten the borders further and were open to how he might combat inflation. 

The tariff regime of his first term was popular enough, and some of it, like the taxes slapped on China, were embraced by the Biden administration. 

Trump had promised, as a candidate, to not blast apart the social safety net, and Americans believed him. He had political capital to spend down — far more, certainly, than he did at the start of 2017.

Trump has had a consequential presidency, thrilling enough if you are a particular kind of person — one who is not actually well-represented in the American electorate. Nativists and outright racists have much to delight over, and followers of Stephen Miller are reaching their own dark nirvana. Trump has dramatically increased the reach of (evil❗) ICE, attempted to revoke birthright citizenship, and made immigration to the United States inordinately more challenging. Little of this is broadly celebrated, and the most American voters, independents especially, desired out of a second Trump term was a curtailment of mass illegal immigration. 

Legal immigration is plenty popular, and there’s enough fresh polling to suggest that Trump’s hypermilitarized ICE is not fulfilling any broader mandates. Thanks to Trump, Americans are becoming gradually more pro-immigrant again, perhaps recalling what nativist cruelty looks like in practice.

Trump’s economic agenda is another deep, lasting strike against the realignment. Tariffs, in theory, belong to the protectionist, populist cause Trump championed, but they mean little if they aren’t paired with any greater federally funded industrial policy. Unlike Biden, Trump has not attempted to directly boost domestic manufacturing or America’s withering supply chains, especially as China looms as the world’s greatest 21st-century industrial superpower. 

In April, Trump temporarily tanked the stock market, and while markets have recovered and are now at new highs, Americans are much more wary of Trump’s stewardship of the economy. Trade wars aren’t especially exciting to voters.

More crucial, though, is the One Big Beautiful Act (aka, "the big bad, ugly bill) and the enormous social safety-net cuts, particularly to Medicaid, 

 that will be felt in the coming years. Beyond tax cuts, there’s little for Republicans to easily campaign on, and the reduced funding to rural hospitals and clinics will make for great Democratic campaign fodder next year. The reconciliation package, largely, was a hodgepodge of orthodox Republican fiscal policy that never found much support from voters after the 1990s. This was Trump’s great insight, after all — he’d run against pure supply-side economics in 2016, swerving away from Mitt Romney–style conservatism. 

But, campaigning and governing are entirely different matters, and Trump has shown he’s willing to bow to the traditionalists in his party when it comes to bills that arrive on his desk for a signature.
The other populist Republicans wilted, too. 

Senator Josh Hawley "run Josh run", cowardly escape during the January 6th insurrection at the capitol 

Hawley vowed to not vote for a package that slashed Medicaid and then did it anyway. Now he meekly wants to reverse those cuts, but the damage has been done. Vance, as Trump’s vice-president, must cheerlead whatever his boss does, especially with a fight for the 2028 nomination on the horizon. The Jeffrey Epstein saga, meanwhile, threatens to overshadow the lawmaking and cause great anguish for MAGA, who are caught between obeying their beloved leader (who wants all Epstein discourse to cease) and chasing Epstein threads in perpetuity. Epstein, the late sex criminal, bedevils them because Trump is no less implicated than any Democrats, and answers will prove elusive for all time.

The more banal fallout of this all is that America remains a nation split between red and blue, with neither party gaining a decisive advantage. Republicans cannot triangulate or realign the electorate in such a manner to doom the Democrats to irrelevancy. Democrats can’t seem to excite voters enough to revive the promise of an Obama-esque landslide. Democrats have the edge to flip the House next year, while Republicans should be the favorites to retain Senate control. The 2028 race is probably going to be a closely divided slog, no matter whom the major parties nominate. This is what we are, and what we are going to be.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans all directly related to immigrants but now they impose cruel deportations as punishment for innocent people

What will you do when they come for you?

Regarding “Closed immigration cases are being resurrected under Trump,” (July 22): I’m in awe — and deeply disturbed — by the growing number of people being deported from the so-called land of the free and home of the brave. (As the Trump administration intensifies its efforts to deport a record number of immigrants, Houston immigration lawyers are seeing an increase in the government’s efforts to resurrect cases that have been placed on hold, sometimes for several years. The legal maneuver to add an old case to a current docket isn’t new. But attorneys now think it’ll become commonplace as the Trump administration moves forward with its plans for mass deportations.)

The Statue of Liberty still stands in New York Harbor, holding her torch high as a beacon of freedom, democracy and hope. She was gifted as a symbol of friendship, built to welcome immigrants seeking a better life.

(Paul Pirela, a Houston immigration lawyer, said the government used to resurrect old immigration cases once or twice a year. He had one, in 2023, maybe two. Now, “it's probably, I think, four or five in the last two weeks,” he said.)

The Statue of Libery's torch represents enlightenment, the crown’s seven rays are thought to represent the seven continents and seven seas and the broken chains at her feet represent the end of tyranny and oppression. Her very foundation, in part, honors the abolition of slavery after the Civil War.

Many Americans still believe deportation is just about people from Mexico or Central America, but look again. Immigrants from Guatemala, India, China, Iran and Russia — people from every corner of the globe — are being rounded up.

So, to every immigrant, to every person of conscience, I ask:

• What will you do when it’s your turn?
• What will you do when you’re the one being harassed, threatened, jailed or cast out?

It’s time — past time — to break the cycle of hate and stand together.

Donald Trump made it clear: He has no love for immigrants in America.

This is not just about politics. It’s about justice, freedom and humanity.

What kind of nation are we becoming❓😔😞😠😯😥 

And will we finally stand together to reclaim the promise that Lady Liberty was meant to hold?

From J.L. Leonard, in Houston, Texas